Plea deal requires Miss. Phosphates to donate land

Mississippi Phosphates Corp. pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to a single felony violation of the Clean Water Act.

The violation relates to the Pascagoula company's fertilizer manufacturing facility on Bayou Casotte, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release. The plea hearing was in front of Judge Louis Guirola Jr. in the Southern District's courthouse in Biloxi.

As part of the guilty plea, MPC admitted discharging more than 38 million gallons of acidic wastewater in August 2013. The discharge contained pollutants in amounts DOJ said greatly exceeded MPC's permit limits.

The discharge killed more than 47,000 fish and closed Bayou Casotte. The company also admitted that, in February 2014, it discharged oily wastewater from an open gate on a storm water culvert into Bayou Casotte, creating an oily sheen that extended a mile into the bayou.

Mississippi Phosphates filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last year. Part of its reorganization obligates the company to assist in funding the estimated $120 million cleanup of its site. Its plea deal requires the company to transfer 320 acres of property near the Pascagoula facility to the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which is managed by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Estuarine Research Reserve System.

"With this plea, Mississippi Phosphates has accepted responsibility for having discharged millions of gallons of industrial pollutants that killed tens of thousands of fish, damaged marine habitats and polluted recreational waterways," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Sam Hirsch said in a written statement. "Mississippi Phosphates has acknowledged its misconduct and has been sentenced to transfer property it owns that is adjacent to the Grand Bay National Estuary, thus protecting and potentially rehabilitating a vital marine resource that this company's pollutant discharges had severely damaged."

When it was in full production, the Pascagoula facility manufactured diammonium phosphate fertilizers from phosphate rock. That process generated a variety of pollutants and hazardous wastes, including acids and ammonia.

If improperly discharged, acids and ammonia can be highly toxic to fish and other marine life.

According to court papers, since January 2000, MPC has been cited by MDEQ in numerous notices for hundreds of violations of its Clean Water Act permit for discharging wastewater in amounts that exceeded its permitted limits. The company was also cited for its failure to maintain adequate wastewater storage capacity, its discharge of untreated wastewater from its sulfuric acid plant directly through its main outfall, its combined release of untreated and undertreated stormwater and process wastewater from other outfalls, and its failure to implement required remedial measures to prevent similar discharges, DOJ said.

An April 2005 discharge resulted in the release of more than 17 million gallons of highly acidic wastewater into waterways adjacent to its facility, including Bayou Casotte, Tillman Creek and Bangs Lake of the Grand Bay reserve, the DOJ said. Those waters are considered some of the most productive nurseries for aquatic species on Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

That incident resulted in the death of thousands of fish and other marine life, and the destruction of marsh grass, trees and shrubs.

Afterward, DOJ said Mississippi Phosphates never implemented measures to prevent similar incidents, despite orders from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to do so.